Russia's ruling party faces fraud allegations

Russia's ruling party faces fraud allegations

By Thomas Grove and Steve Gutterman

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Olga Lazareva, a communist working as a polling station official in Russia's parliamentary election, says she woke a few hours before the polls opened to find her apartment door had been glued shut.

The glue, she said, was meant to delay her arrival on Sunday at the voting station in Tula, south of Moscow, where her approval was needed to confirm ballot boxes were empty and a free and fair election could begin. She managed to get out by calling relatives who forced open the door.

Lazareva said she suspects other commission members planned to stuff the boxes with ballots for Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia, which had its majority in parliament cut by voters tired of the entrenched ruling party.

She said by telephone that four other communists had similar experiences at polling stations in her neighborhood as part of what Tula's communists said was a series of dirty tricks intended to boost the vote for Putin's party.

"There were unprecedented violations in this election," said Lazareva, 60. "I have been on the commission since 1990 and I've seen a lot, but I have never see such blatant misconduct."

Although there was, in the end, no ballot-box stuffing at Lazareva's polling station, the communist campaign chief in Tula, Valentina Mishina, said it was widespread in the province.

"When boxes were opened there were packs of 50, 60 ballots folded in half and bundled up, all clearly filled out by the same hand," Mishina said.

Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, whose party came second with nearly 20 percent of the vote, said it was the dirtiest election since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 even though United Russia suffered a big decline in support.

European observers said the vote "was characterized by frequent procedural violations and instances of apparent manipulation, including several serious indications of ballot box stuffing."

They said the field was slanted in United Russia's favour and the campaign was marked by "limited political competition and a lack of fairness."

President Dmitry Medvedev, who is stepping aside next year to allow for Putin's return to the top seat of power for the world's largest energy producer, rejected allegations of fraud and called the vote "fair, honest and democratic."

BALLOT STUFFING

Tiny Kox, head of the delegation of monitors from the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly, said numerous ballots were found folded together in a sign of ballot stuffing at about 10 percent of the polling stations his team monitored.

Both the White House and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said they had "serious concerns" about the conduct of the election.

The communists said they had won more votes than the result recorded for them and threatened legal action.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky's nationalist LDPR party also cried foul, saying its monitors were thrown out of polling stations in the oil-producing region of Bashkortostan and in the Black Sea Krasnodar region.

A spokesman, who declined to be named, said election commission members in the Siberian Chelyabinsk province had been openly campaigning for United Russia inside the polling station.

Political analysts say the centralization of power under Putin during his eight-year presidency until 2008 encourages abuses because many regions compete to secure the highest vote for United Russia -- a show of loyalty they hope will be rewarded by a bigger share of state handouts.

A cyber attack shut down the website of independent Russian election monitor Golos and prevented it displaying an interactive map showing reports of alleged violations.

"The attack was an attempt to close down our reporting on violations, because the violations we have shown reflect very poorly on the people who are in power," said Golos deputy director Grigory Melkonyants.

(Editing by Timothy Heritage)

RUSSIA VOTES: Putin and Russia are the winners in this election

http://www.bne.eu/storyf3098/RUSSIA_VOTES_Putin_and_Russia_are_the_winners_in_this_election

The surprise result in the Russian parliamentary elections was that everyone was awarded pretty much the votes they actually got.

There were few surprises in the actual results. United Russia walked the ballot to take 49% of the vote with most of the votes counted. Then the Communist Party of the Russian Federation took another 20%, Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s nationalist LDPR won 12% and centre-left Just Russia another 12%. The remaining parties on the list failed to clear the 7% threshold needed to get any seats.

But what is so surprising about these results is that they were more-or-less the same as what the polls had been predicting, meaning the Kremlin accepted the results in what should be called the first truly free and fair elections since Putin came to power in 2000.

A few caveats here: the state still has a monopoly over the media and the opposition was seriously hindered in its efforts to campaign by dirty tricks and official obfuscation. Still, the danger was that the Kremlin would attempt to stuff ballots and ensure that United Russia won 62% of the vote and so gain a constitutional majority. What has actually happened is managed democracy in action: the state let the people have a real vote, but has ensured that the winners of the vote remain inside the political ring-fence set up by the Kremlin around the political process.

If you compare this result to votes in the West, then clearly it is disappointing. But compared to most of the countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, it was truly representative.

Nevertheless, the bottom line is the Kremlin remains firmly in charge. United Russia’s votes together with the loyal LDPR means it will still have a constitutional majority. What has changed here is Zhirinovsky has been promoted to a major force in Russia politics. However, completely loyal, totally cynical and eminently corruptible, Zhirinovsky is more than an acceptable candidate for this new role, as the LDPR has always toed the Kremlin line and won't change now that it has real power.

The biggest surprise was the strong showing by the Communist Party. The strong support has nothing to do with Gennady Zyuganov's campaigning; clearly the strong support was a protest vote, as the Communists were the only true opposition on the ballot, ineffective and unappealing as they are.

Ironically, this is what happened in Central Europe in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc: the communist parties remade themselves and won power in the first few years of independence. They were not very effective and were mostly voted out again, but their stint in office served to focus the liberal parties on the need to address the concerns of the people and come up with credible policies. No-one seriously expects Russia’s Communist Party to go so far as to actually win office, but by allowing it to do so well the Kremlin will have to up its game and think more about what the people want or else face even worse results in the next election.

And the elections have set a precedent: by allowing a more-or-less free vote this time round, the Kremlin will find it harder to blatantly fix any elections in the future. The Kremlin probably had the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the revolution in Kyrgyzstan and most recently the riots in Belarus a year ago in mind when it decided to accept a real vote – after all, the Kremlin remains in power even if its grip has been weakened.